Trackback – Howto


What trackback does – an example.


Suppose you read a post on someone else's blog, Blog-A say, and you think there is relevant content (posts and comments) on your site, Blog-B.

It would be helpful if if readers of Blog-A could see the post and comments on your site Blog-B. That may or may not be possible.

Is it possible?


It will be possible if
The administrator of site Blog-A has enabled trackback for the site, and
The administrator of site Blog-A has enabled trackback for the post, and
You are using a theme on Blog-B that has code to display trackback options to the screen.
Here is how it is done:


Visit Blog-A, read the relevant post, and find the trackback URL. This may be difficult for there is no standard way of presenting it. Different themes put it in different places on the screen and call it by different names. Copy the link to your clipboard. Typically the link will be something like
'http://www.someone_elses_domain.co.uk/wordpress/wp-trackback.php?p=123'
Visit your own site, Blog-B, and edit the post you wish to have accessible from Blog-A. You should paste the trackback URL from the previous step (Blog-A's trackback URL) into the 'Send trackback to' field.
Fill in the 'Excerpt' field with a taster of what is in your post. This is what will be shown on the remote blog (Blog-A).
Update the post.

It may happen almost immediately or there may be a delay before the taster and a link to the post on your blog (Blog-B) appears on the other blog (Blog-A). Some site administrators like all contributions to their blog to be moderated before publishing.

What can go wrong

No output on remote site

The remote administrator has not configured his site correctly – the correct permissions and correct use of caching are important.
v The data is waiting for moderation.

A spam catcher has discarded it.

You have not configured you own site correctly to send the trackback data.

The remote site may be using a different blog publishing protocol from Wordpress. You may have to go to Dashboard -> Settings -> Writing and tick the box Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols. (Wordpress is already set by default) and/or tick the box Enable the Atom Publishing Protocol
Bootnote

Many Blog sites do not enable trackback because of the problem with 'Comment Spam'. If you get a spam problem (with or without trackback) try using akismet.


For further help on trackback see WordPress Trackback Tutorial - by Teli Adlam.